Hostgator Web Hosting Review and {latest} Deals

Unbiased HostGator Web Hosting Review

Over time, I’ve used many web hosting and today in this article, I’ll be reviewing HostGator web hosting service that I’ve been using for many years now.

Apart from that, you can find hosting coupons and deals in the middle as well as at the end of this article. So read this article till the end.

For me, HostGator has been one of the best hosting service providers so far. Whether its a customer support or how much of live / monthly visitors it can handle, every time I found HostGator performing not so bad.

Back in 2015, one of my websites which wasn’t hosted with HostGator went down due to traffic spiking up to 500 live visitors and it resulted me in loss of more than $4000.

The website was hosted on a shared hosting plan with some not so known company and couldn’t handle this much of traffic.

The spike in traffic was unexpected and it was due to WhatsApp calling feature that company had brought to the cross platform instant messaging app last year.

My website was #1 for many keywords related to WhatsApp and was earning average of $500 per day.

It was a simple WordPress blog and I had no idea that it can have this much of traffic otherwise I’d have shifted it to a better hosting service. I noticed increase in traffic well in advance but had no idea, it will go upto this level.

I know many shared hosting can’t handle avg of 500 live visitors but this is not the case with HostGator.

HostGator’s Baby plan has handled 1500+ live visitors for me on a shared hosting plan without any problem and I’m pretty much satisfied with it.

Anyways its past now and I’ve learned a great lesson from this incident.

I’ve been using HostGator and its working pretty well for me. I’m having Baby plan which doesn’t cost much and allows to host unlimited websites.

HostGator Web Hosting Plan for Everyone’s needs

HosGator offers three different shared hosting plans and you can buy one based on the requirement. If you are willing to host only one domain, Hatching Plan would suffice.

However, if you see the requirement of hosting more than one domain moving forward, Baby Plan is a better choice by paying few extra bucks.

The last plan which is called Business Plan is suitable for businesses which have the requirements of SSL Certificates, dedicated IP, voIP service, Toll free number etc.

All the plans come with unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth !

The above image is taken when HostGator is running a promotion and offering 50% off on all the shared hosting plan. It can happen the offer has ended when you read this article, please click below to know current price:

HostGator company background

Background – By now HostGator has become a market leader. It was founded back in 2002 by Brent Oxley in a dorm room at Florida Atlantic University.

HostGator offers shared, reseller, VPS, Dedicated server, application, WordPress hosting and domain name registration at a very good price. The company has been operating for about 14 years and won several awards.

It was started in October 2002 and by Feb 2003, the company had about 112 clients and by next year, there was more than 1000 customers using their hosting.

They expanded the business and opened overseas offices in Canada, Brazil and other part of the world. The company registered phenomenal success and reached 200,000 customer mark by Sep, 2009.

With more than 500+ global stuff and top notch customer support, HostGator has become a global leader.

Factors HostGator Web Hosting measured –

# 1 – Reliability Factor

Rating

Explanation

Five star for Reliability – Webhosting is the backbone of every business which operates online. Let it be a blog which earns through Google adsense, or a ecommerce website where people come and make purchases. If your website is down, you are incurring losses.

Since hosting is the main aspect of an online business, it becomes utmost important for us to buy reliable web hosting.

When it comes to reliability, I found HostGator pretty much reliable. My websites which are hosted with HostGator hardly go down. Infact I never seen my sites went down ever in these 3 three years.

Google tries to offer the best user experience and if the website goes offline often, there is high chances Google pushes away the website in search results. You can’t afford to get your website pushed away.

# 2 – Customer Support

Rating

Explanation

Five star for Customer support – In the online business, purchasing a product and getting customer support go hand in hand. It is not like once we purchase the product, we don’t need any assistance from the company.

In due course of use of the product, we face several issues and need to be sorted out with the help of customer support team. Hence apart from considering the cost part, one must consider customer support as well.

For me and I’m sure everyone else too, how good a customer support of a company is, is a deciding factor. I am concerned about the costing but at the same time make sure I get a good support. I wouldn’t mind paying a few extra bucks if a company offering good customer support.

In my story I discussed above, although connecting to the customer support team through live chat and the phone was easier but I’ve no idea why they were not good at resolving issues fasters.

HostGator offers one of the best customer support through live chat as well through a call. Apart from that you can raise a ticket explaining the issues in details. They are good with e-mail as well. HostGator offers 24x7x365 customer support via all possible means.

The interesting thing is, their experts have written down detailed tutorial to resolve issues which occurs commonly.

When you contact customer support team, you are asked to write the problem in brief before actually connecting to customer support staff and if the problem is something common, you’re presented with pre-written tutorials to resolve the problem your own. If you aren’t much of a technical person, you can always skip tutorial part and get in touch with the staff.

Due to large customer base and the issues people are facing, you might need to wait for sometime to live chat with a support staff but that’s fairly ok.

# 3 – User Friendliness

Rating

Explanation

Five star for user friendliness – The hosting is pretty much user friendly and anyone without much technical knowledge can do the job. The control panel is arranged so well that you don’t need to search much for a particular item.

With “Quick Install” feature, you can install any blogging platform such as WordPress, forum, directory script etc.

# 4 Software

Rating

Explanation

Five star for user software – The quick install allows you to chose to install the software/script given below free of cost:

Blog –

WordPress

LifeType

Billing –

WHMCS

WebCalender

Chat –

CraftySyntax

phpFreeChat

X7 Chat

CMS –

b2evolution

concerete5

Drupal 6, 7, 8

e107

glFusion

Hotaru

Joomla

liveSite

Mambo

Modx

Nucleus

ocPortal

Open Atrium

PHP-Nuke

phpwcms

Pligg

Saurus CMS

Textpattern

Tiki

Trendy Site builder

Topo3

Xoops

Zikula

Directory –

DewNewPHPLinks

eCommerce –

Magento

phpCOIN

Prestashop

SugarCRM

TomatoCart

vtiger CRM

ZenCart

eLearning –

Claroline

Moodle

ePortfolio Software –

Mahara

Forums –

Advanced Electron Forum

bbPress

MyBB

phpBB

punBB

Simple Machines Forum

Gallery –

4images

Coppermine

Gallery

Piwigo

Pixelpost

Zenphoto

Guestbook –

Lazarus Guestbook

Mail –

Dada Mail

phplist

Project Management –

dotProject

PHPProjekt

Push –

Z-Push

Social Networking –

Elgg

Jcow

Thinkup

Support –

MantisBT

OpenDocMan

osTicket

phpMyFAQ

Survey –

Advanced Poll

LimeSurvey

phpESP

Wiki –

MediaWiki

PmWiki

Wikka

So with this much of software, I believe hostgator is not a bad option. I’ve several websites and forums using these scripts and doing pretty well.

# 5 – Pricing

Rating

Explanation

Four and half star for user friendliness – There are several companies in the world offering great hosting service at a good price. HostGator offers premium service and I don’t mind paying extra bucks for the service they are offering yet for someone who just started, the price is little bit higher than other hosts.

Remember one thing – Something which is good is priced bit higher and it doesn’t hurt to pay some extra bucks if you are satisfied.

In my case, If I had HostGator shared hosting back in 2015, I would have not incurred lost of $4000.

Conclusion

Your online business is totally dependent on the website availability hence you need to make sure it is always up and running. In most of the cases the websites go down due to bad hosting.

HostGator is having about 0.01% downtime which is pretty good Apart from this, a good support, reliability, user friendliness, softwares makes HostGator a good hosting company.

Sunil is the founder of Blogging an Art, Blogger & Internet Marketing Consultant. He likes to write about SEO, Affiliate marketing, Social media marketing, Email marketing and other related stuff. He is an active contributor at various tech blogs as well and loves to travel.

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About me

Besides being the founder of BloggingAnArt.com, I'm a Blogger & Internet Marketing Consultant. I've been active in Internet Marketing for about a decade and helped many businesses to grow their website traffic and sales multiple fold. Read more